So, it looks like the mantle has been passed to me to investigate porting EMC2 to the Beagle Board. A lot of it looks really good, but then there's one big holdup. I have inquired over at the rtai list, and have not been able to get any response out of them. I have restated my request, with plenty of kowtow-ing, and hope maybe somebody will throw me a bone. They seem to have built an rtai patch for an ARM7 CPU some time back, but haven't continued to update it. I don't know how much the Cortex-A8 CPU is different from an ARM7, but certainly the Cortex has floating point (even worse, TWO flavors of FP, native and SIMD) and so the FP state needs to be saved on context switches. Also the clock is about 10X faster, so likely some of the timekeeping registers and such have been changed. I was hoping that the rtai folks would be more responsive, or maybe have a subgroup working on this. Or maybe I am asking in the wrong place, and there is a separate group working on the ARM platforms.
So, does anyone know ANYTHING about these topics? Without help from the rtai gurus, I have extreme doubt I could pull this off by myself, in less than a couple years. And, I certainly don't have that kind of time to devote to such a project. I can see the Beagle Board being used as a headless CNC controller running Ubuntu, rtai and EMC2 (without Axis) and connected by Ethernet to a laptop or other X-supporting machine with Axis. If the actual performance of the Beagle's CPU measures up, it looks like it could beat an X86 system for latency and parallel port throughput, has easier availability to a LOT of I/O pins, and could also do a speeded-up EPP mode transfer for my boards. I'd really like to forge ahead with this, but the apparent lack of rtai is a huge roadblock. Is there maybe another RT patch that IS working, or nearly working, for the Cortex-A8? Thanks, Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
